LUSH Artist Talk Tomorrow at Noon

If you haven't made it to Simcoe County's most recent art gallery, perhaps this is the month to do it. Manifested by Jeannette Luchese, Be Contemporary is both a commercial and experimental space that recognizes the importance of art to the lives of all as well as the importance of opportunities to show for artists.

Running until September 4th, the current shows feature new works by Marlene Hilton Moore and myself, as well as a delightful series of collages by Regina Williams.

Located in the main gallery, LUSH: Fabrications in Yarn and Fabric, is an installation based exhibit that works at the intersections of textiles, photography and architecture to celebrate the embodied knowledge women carry as assemblers of materials and form as well as investigate how textiles work to sculpt or prescribe one's roles and identity within a given culture.

A feast for the eyes from multiple vantage points, Marlene Hilton Moore’s photographic work, combined with sculpture, architecture, and artifacts, develops narratives based upon a woman, a dress, and a place. Visually weaving together encoded cultural messages that allude to personal social histories, Marlene brings together two series of work to create a continuum of her investigation into identify formation. Juxtaposing a pure white mannequin wearing an intensely embroidered dress with richly textured objects and a vivid historic interior from her body of work entitled Inside My Skin, Hilton Moore’s gallery installation is paired with photographs of Peonia Beauty, a series of images that reveal a dress of black taffeta peonies, a quixotic young woman, and textures of deteriorating architecture. While moving in and out of Marlene’s photos into the physical realm of the artist’s carefully hand-crafted objects and attire, Hilton Moore’s quotidian reality expands into a dance of authenticity and vision.

Across the room from Hilton Moore’s arrangement of sculptures and photos is the most recent compilation of my entanglements, all created from the unmaking of those that came before them. Working much more intentionally with the recycled yarn in conjunction with thrift store porcelain figurines, each work points to how materials in their various forms have a way of controlling, consuming, commodifying, and curating bodies in and out of cultural norms. Often covering much of the figurine’s white surfaces and heads that carry forward Euro-centric and patriarchal notions of femininity, beauty, etiquette and class, I imagined the word LUSH to also express how much of Western Culture is drunk from the excess consumption of material goods, incessantly branded and touted, disseminated and discarded as a result of global, industrial, capitalist systems of exchange.

Please join us for an artist talk tomorrow at noon with the MacLaren Art Centre, or visit the gallery from 12 - 5, Wednesdays thru Saturday, 7869 Yonge Street, Innisfil Ontario Canada, L9s 1K8.